The present invention relates to quilting, and particularly to the quilting of pattern bearing products such as mattress covers. The invention further relates to the manufacture of quilted materials that bear printed patterns. The invention is particularly useful where the quilting is performed on multi-needle quilting machines, where the quilting and printing are applied to roll fed or web material or where differing products are produced in small quantities and in batches.
Quilting is a special art in the general field of sewing in which patterns are stitched through a plurality of layers of material over a two dimensional area of the material. The multiple layers of material normally include at least three layers, one a woven primary or facing sheet that will have a decorative finished quality, one a usually woven backing sheet that may or may not be of a finished quality, and one or more internal layers of thick filler material, usually of randomly oriented fibers. The stitched patterns maintain the physical relationship of the layers of material to each other as well as provide ornamental qualities. In quilting, two different approaches are generally used.
Single needle quilters of the type illustrated and described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,640,916 and 5,685,250, and those patents cited and otherwise referred to therein are customarily used for the stitching of most comforters, some bedspreads and other products from pre-formed or pre-cut rectangular panels. Some single needle quilters are used to quilt patterns on fabric that carries a pre-woven or printed pattern, with the quilting adding to or enhancing the appearance of the pattern. Such quilters require that pre-patterned material be manually positioned in the quilting apparatus so that the quilting can be registered with the pre applied pattern or a complicated visual positioning system be used. With such systems, border quilting or coarse pattern quilting can be achieved but high quality outline quilting around the pre applied patterns or the quilting of pattern details of a fraction of an inch in scale are difficult to achieve, particularly automatically. Single needle quilters are usually lock stitch machines.
Large scale quilting operations have been used for many years in the production of bedding products. Mattress covers, which enclose and add padding to inner spring, foam or other resilient core structure, provide functional as well as ornamental features to a mattress. Mattress covers are typically made up of quilted top and bottom panels, which contribute to the support and comfort characteristics of a mattress, and an elongated side panel, which surrounds the periphery of the mattress to join the top and bottom panels around their edges to enclose the inner spring unit or other mattress interior.
Mattresses are made in a small variety of standard sizes and a much larger variety of combinations of interiors and covers to provide a wide range of support and comfort features and to cover a wide range of product prices. To provide variety of support and comfort requirements, the top and bottom panels of mattress covers are quilted using an assortment of fills and a selection of quilted patterns. To accommodate different mattress thicknesses, border panels of different widths are required with variations in the fill for border panels being less common. Border panels as well as top and bottom panels are usually made in different sizes to accommodate all of the standard mattress sizes.
Mattress covers are usually quilted on web-fed multi-needle quilters. Only one side of the quilted product need be finished for a mattress cover, so one layer of ornamental top goods or ticking is usually combined with fill and backing material to produce the mattress cover products on a chain stitch quilting machine which can use large spools of thread and quilt on webs of material supplied on rolls. Multiple needle quilters of the type illustrated in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,154,130 and 5,544,599 are customarily used for the stitching of mattress covers, some bedspreads and other such products which are commonly formed from multi-layered web fed material. These multi-needle quilters include banks of mechanically ganged needles that sew multiple copies of a recurring pattern on the fabric. With such multi-needle machines, the combining of quilting with pre-applied printed or woven patterns in the fabric which would require registration of the quilting with the pre-applied patterns is usually not attempted. Multi-needle quilters are usually chain stitch machines. Such quilters include banks of mechanically ganged needles that sew multiple copies of a recurring pattern.
The ornamental characteristics of the ticking that form the outer surface of a mattress is regarded as important in the marketing of bedding products. Bedding manufacturers stock a variety of ticking materials of different colors and types, many having different sewn or printed patterns. Maintaining an adequate inventory of ticking requires the stocking of rolls of different widths of materials of different colors and patterns. The cost of such an inventory as well as the storage and handling of such an inventory contributes substantially to the manufacturing cost of bedding products.
Some of these quilted patterns are highly ornate and contribute materially to the appearance of the quilted products, particularly those that are of higher quality and cost, and which are made in smaller quantities. With such high-end products, the combining of quilting with pre-applied printed or woven patterns in the fabric may call for registration of the quilting with the pre-applied patterns, which is difficult to achieve with multi-needle machines. But other quilted products, such as those with simple zig-zag quilted patterns, are more functional, and rely on the varieties of the ticking material for the visual distinctiveness of the product. The varieties of ticking materials include those sewn or printed with different patterns. For such products, printed patterns are usually applied by the ticking supplier and rolls of ticking of each pattern are inventoried by the mattress cover manufacturer.
Other quilting machines and methods employing some of the characteristics of both single needle panel type quilters and web fed multi-needle quilters are disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/831,060 of Jeff Kaetterhenry, et al. filed Apr. 1, 1997 and entitled Web-fed Chain-stitch Single-needle Mattress Cover Quilter with Needle Deflection Compensation, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,832,849 and U.S. patent application Ser. No: 09/189,656 of Bondanza et al., filed Nov. 10, 1998 and entitled Web-fed Chain-stitch Single-needle Mattress Cover Quilter with Needle Deflection Compensation, both hereby expressly incorporated by reference herein. Such a machine uses one or more separately controllable single needle heads that apply chain stitches to panels or webs.
The production of quilts by off-line processes, that is those involving both printing and quilting processes performed on different production lines, has included specialty product production involving the outlining or other coordinated stitching onto material on which patterns have been preprinted. Stitching in such processes is traditionally carried out with manually guided single needle quilting machines. Proposed automated systems using vision systems to follow a preprinted pattern or other schemes to automatically stitch on the preprinted material have been proposed but have not proven successful. Registration of pattern stitching with preprinted patterns has been a problem. While efforts to align printing and stitching longitudinally or transversely have been made, angular orientation of the printed web and the angular alignment printed patterns with the quilting head has been ignored. Correction for misalignment of quilted and printed patterns by repositioning of a quilting or printing head is inadequate if multi-needle quilters are to be used, particularly where angular mis-orientation is present.
Application of registration techniques to roll fed materials, where printing and quilting are performed on the material webs, presents additional problems. Registration errors that are minor where patterns are applied to individual panels produce cumulative errors when patterns are applied to webs. This is particularly true where angular orientation errors result due to skewing of the web as it is fed into the subsequent pattern applying machine after removed from a machine in which the first pattern has been applied.
With off-line processes for applying one pattern and then another in registration with the first, one by printing and one by quilting, production of quilts in small batches of pattern combinations is particularly a problem. Each batch can include one or a few quilted products of a common design made up of a printed pattern and a quilted pattern in combination, with the products of different batches, preferably to be consecutively made on the same machinery, being made up of a different printed pattern in combination with a different quilted pattern. As a result, the matching of the second pattern to be applied with the correct pre-applied pattern as the partially completed products are moved from a first machine or production line to a second is critical and a potential source of error as well as production delay.
For example, the outer layer of material used for mattress covers that is referred to as ticking is supplied in a variety of colors and preprinted or dyed patterns. Generally, mattress manufacturers who are the customers of the quilted mattress cover manufacturers or quilting machinery manufacturers require a wide variety of ticking material patterns to produce a variety of bedding products. Frequently, small quantities of each of the variety of products must be made to supply their customers"" requirements, requiring the maintenance of inventories of a large number of different patterns of ticking material, which involves substantial cost. Further, the need to constantly match patterns as well as to change ticking supply rolls when manufacturing such a variety of products in small quantities can be a major factor in reducing the throughput of a mattress making process and delaying production. These and related problems continually exist in the manufacture of bedspreads, comforters and other quilted products where a variety of products in small quantities is desired.
Other off-line processes may involve the loading of rolls of ticking materials commonly bearing a pre-applied pattern onto the quilting machines. Lower cost mattresses are often made by sewing generic quilted patterns onto printed pattern material. However, frequent changing of the ticking material to produce products having a variety of appearances, requires interruption of the operation of the quilting machine for manual replacement and splicing of the material. This adds to labor costs and lowers equipment productivity. Further, the spliced area of the material web which must be cut from the quilted material is wasted. Furthermore, since mattress top and bottom panels are often thicker, and vary in thickness more than border panels, border panels are sometimes quilted on quilting lines that are separate from those used to quilt the top and bottom panels. Since border panels are usually preferred to match the top and bottom panels, the changing of ticking on the top and bottom panel line is almost always accompanied by a similar change of ticking material on the border panel line. Coordination of the two production lines, as well as the matching of border panels with the top and bottom panels, requires well executed control procedures and can lead to assembly errors or production delays.
There exists a need in mattress cover manufacturing for a capability of efficiently producing small quantities of quilted fabric such as mattress covers, comforters, bedspreads and the like where different pre-applied patterns on the product are desired to be enhanced by combining the pre-applied and quilted patterns, particularly where combinations of quilted patterns and printed or other pre-applied patterns must vary with each or every few products. Further, there is a need in mattress cover manufacturing to improve the productivity and efficiency of making quilted products, particularly mattress covers, having a variety of designs without increasing, or while reducing, production costs.
An objective of the present invention is to provide quilt manufacturers, particularly mattress cover manufacturers, with the ability to produce quilted products having a wide variety of patterns that include both quilting and printed or other images or designs efficiently and economically. A particular objective of the invention is to provide such ability without the need to inventory material in a large number of different pre-applied designs.
A further objective of the invention is to provide for the intricate outline or other coordinated quilting of designs or patterns on multi-layered materials in a highly efficient, economical, high speed and automated manner, particularly by both applying the printed design or pattern and quilting the outline or other coordinated quilted enhancement of the printed design or pattern in sequence on the same manufacturing line.
Another objective of the present invention is to efficiently provide for customizable printed and quilted patterns on mattress covers, bedspreads and the like, which can be varied on an individual piece basis or with among items produced in small quantities. It is a particular objective of the present invention to provide flexibility in the production of mattress ticking and quilted mattress covers having patterns that can differ from product to product.
A further objective of the present invention is to reduce quilting downtime due to the need to make ticking or other material changes, pattern changes or machine adjustments. A more particular objective of the present invention is to provide a quilting method and apparatus with which quilted patterns and printed patterns may be applied in registration and varied on a quilting machine.
A particular objective of the present invention is to aid the production of quilted material by combining both printed patterns and quilted patterns wherein multiple copies of the quilted patterns can be simultaneously applied using a multi-needle quilter. An additional particular objective of the present invention is to facilitate accurate, coordinated application of patterns by printing and quilting to web or roll fed material. Another particular objective of the present invention is to assist in the automatic coordination of printed and quilted patterns of products produced successively in small batches of different products. These objectives are most particularly sought in systems in which a first pattern, such as a printed pattern, is applied off-line from the machine on which the second pattern, such as a quilted pattern, is to be applied in registration with the first pattern.
An additional objective of the present invention is to provide for the efficient arrangement of top, bottom and border panels of different printed patterns on one or more webs or sections of a fabric. A further objective of the invention is to coordinate the matching and assembly of the different panels that make up each of a plurality of differently.
According to principles of the present invention, a quilting method and apparatus are provided for the manufacture of a quilted product by a combination of printed pattern application and quilting. The process provided includes the application of the printed pattern and the application of a quilted pattern with the pattern that is applied second being applied in registration with the first. Preferably the printed pattern is applied first. Both the printed and the quilted patterns are printed from electronic source files. The printing is carried out by a process referred to as Direct Digital Printing, which is defined in the industry as commercial-quality printing in which the electronic source files are processed directly on the printing press or printing system, rather than through analog steps such as film imagesetting and platemaking. Even though the included printing may be from elecronic source files that are may not be literally xe2x80x9cdigitalxe2x80x9d and the excluded image setting and plate-making may could be literally digital rather than analog as the terms digital and analog are used in the electronics arts. Direct digital printing systems may be based on lithographic offset technology or laser/toner technology. In the preferred embodiment of the invention, the printing is carried out by ink-jet printing processes. Further, in accordance with preferred embodiments of the invention, the printing is applied directly to the substrate without the use of an offset or transfer process.
According to the various embodiments of the present invention, the principles set forth above are achieved by applying printed designs and coordinated quilted patterns to multilayered material on either the same production line, on separate production lines, or under the control of a common machine and pattern controller. On a single line system, multiple layers of the material for the forming a quilt are supported on a frame on which a printing head and a quilting head are also mounted. A mechanism is provided to impart relative movement of the supported material relative to the quilting and printing heads. Such a mechanism can include a material conveyor that moves the material with respect to the frame, and/or head transport mechanisms that move the heads to and from the material when it is fixed relative to the frame. Either the supported material or the heads or both are moved relative to each other under the control of a programmed computer control to apply printed designs and quilted patterns to the material in mutual registration. Preferably, the printed designs are applied first onto the top layer or facing material, then a pattern is quilted in registration with the printed designs. Alternatively, printed designs can be applied after the patterns are quilted.
According to certain embodiments, a quilting apparatus is provided with a supply of multiple layers of material to be quilted and printed with a combination printed design and quilt pattern. An outer or top layer is fed, preferably as a continuous web, through a series of stations. At one station, a printed design is applied to the top or facing layer of material. At another station, preferably downstream of the printing station, a quilted pattern is applied to the multiple layered fabric of material including the facing material layer and filler and backing material layers. Whichever pattern or design is applied second, preferably the quilted pattern, it is applied in registration with the pattern or design that has been applied first to the fabric under the control of a programmed controller. A curing station or oven may be further provided downstream or as part of the printing station to cure the dye or ink applied at the printing station.
In certain machines according to the invention, a printing station is provided on a frame and quilting station is located on the frame, preferably downstream from the printing apparatus. A material conveyer is provided that brings fabric printed at the printing station into the quilting station with the location of the printed pattern known so that one or more quilting heads at the quilting station can be registered with the printed pattern.
According to one preferred embodiment of the invention, the printing station includes one or more ink-jet printing or dye transfer heads moveable under computer control over the outer or facing layer of material. Additional layers of material are combined with the outer layer, preferably downstream of the printing station and after a printed pattern is applied to the outer layer at the printing station. In this embodiment, the quilted pattern is then quilted onto the material in registration with the printed pattern. Registration may be achieved by maintaining information in a controller of the location of the printed pattern on a facing material and of the relative location of the heads with respect to the facing material.
In embodiments where the material is moved on a conveyor successively through the printing and quilting stations, information of the location of the design or pattern on the facing material and of the material on the conveyor is maintained by the controller. The material may be fed in separate precut panel sections, as continuous patterns and designs along a web, or in discrete panel sections along a continuous web. Where the printed design is applied before the quilting, which is preferred, information of the exact location of the design on the facing material is maintained as the material moves from the printing station, as the filler and backing layers of material are brought into contact with the outer layer or facing material, and as the material is fed to the quilting station. For example, outline quilting the pattern in computer controlled registration with the printed pattern can be carried out, or some other quilting pattern can be applied, based on the maintained registration information of the pattern on the web moving through the apparatus.
In one preferred embodiment, exact registration between the design that is printed onto the material and the pattern that is quilted on the material is maintained by holding a panel section of the multi-layered material onto which the pattern is printed in some securing structure at and between the printing and quilting stations. The panel section can be a separate panel or a portion of a web of material, and may be secured in place on a conveyor. In such an embodiment, the registration may be maintained throughout the entire printing and quilting operation by side securements such as, for example, a pin-tentering material transport that keeps the material fixed relative to the conveyor or securing structure through the printing process and the quilting process. A programmed or process controller controls the relative movement of the fabric and printing and quilting heads, and coordinates the movement in synchronization with printing head control and quilting head control so that the printed and quilted patterns are applied in precise registration.
In other embodiments, the pattern is applied off-line, preferably the printing process. The printed pattern may include a machine identifiable mark or other reference, such as may be achieved by the printing of selvage edge registration marks on the material that are uniquely positioned relative to the printed pattern. The printed material is then transferred to a quilting line at which a quilted pattern is applied in registration with the printed pattern. Preferably, machine readable registration information is produced on the material at more than one transversely spaced points on the material, such as on opposite selvages or side edges of the material. Separate determinations are made from the plural marks as to the relative alignment at two places on the material, such as at both of the opposite side edges. Thus, two such marks can be located when the second pattern is registered to the first, and determination can be made of the skewing or rotation of the material carrying the first or pre-applied pattern.
Adjustment to eliminate skewing or rotation of the fabric, and thereby to achieve registration of the second pattern with the first at transversely spaced locations on the material, is provided by side-to-side material position adjustment. Preferably, adjustment is provided by a split feed roll, with separately rotatable right and left components that are separately controlled in response to separate determinations of the registration of the right and left sides of the material. Separate servo drives or separately controlled particle brakes can be used to control the feed rolls to steer the web. Feed rolls at the upstream end of the quilter may be controlled with brakes to affect the tension of the web through the quilting station with driven feed rolls at the downstream end of the station, thereby controlling shrinkage or stretch of the web longitudinally.
In the preferred embodiments, linear servos motors are provided to drive the print heads, at least transversely, over the substrate. Linear motors are easier to tune, require little service, and have better acceleration and deceleration than belt or other drive systems. Such servos provide accuracy that enables printing to be carried out while the heads are accelerating or decelerating. Programmed compensation is made for the variable head speed by the timing of the jetting of the ink. Thus, areas of the substrate having no printing can be skipped at high speed, greatly improving the speed and efficiency of the print operation by minimizing the time during which the print head is not depositing ink on the substrate.
Preferably, the patterns are applied to webs of material on which different products are to be quilted along the length of the material prior to the panels being separated from the web. Multi-needle quilting machines are also preferably used. Where the printing is applied to the web off-line, side-to-side registration that overcomes the effects of skewing or misorientation of the web achieves equally good registration of the different pattern copies being stitched simultaneously by the multiple needles and overcomes cumulative registration errors as the web is fed.
In certain other embodiments, vision systems may be employed to determine or verify the location of the printed pattern and to enhance or provide registration of the quilting with the printing. Such a vision system may be employed in addition or in the alternative to the computer control of the material transport.
Printed patterns or designs and the quilted patterns may be programmed or stored in memory and, in a programmed or operator selected manner, printed designs and quilted patterns maybe combined in different combinations to produce a wide variety of composite printed and quilted patterns.
In alternative embodiments, the material may be held stationary, rather than moved relative to a fixed frame, and the printing and quilting heads of the respective printing and quilting stations may move relative to the frame and the material fixed on the frame, under the coordination of a controller, to bring a printing head or a quilting head into position over the portion of the material on which a pattern is to be applied. In most applications, quilting a pattern after applying a printed design is preferred. However, aspects of the invention can be utilized to print designs onto material after quilting the material.
Preferably also, a batch control automated system keeps track of the products moving through the process. Where one pattern applying process is off-line, such as where printing is carried out on a line separate from the quilting line on which the stitched pattern is applied, the control matches the quilted pattern and the printed patterns required by each product or batch of products. This can be carried out by maintaining information in a control system memory that will allow for the following of the product through the system or can be assisted by automatically identifying the product on the second line, such as by reading a code, such as a bar code, applied to the product previously and correlated with the pattern that was printed onto the panel or product. Batch control systems are described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,544,599 and in U.S. patent applications Ser. Nos. 09/301,653, filed Apr. 28, 1999, and Ser. No. 09/359,539, filed Jul. 22, 1999.
In the manufacture of mattress covers, printed and quilted top and bottom panels can be produced along with strips of border fabric that are to cover the border, including the sides and the head and foot, of a mattress. Such border panels can be produced with coordinated printed designs and patterns that match or correspond to the top and bottom panels. This can be achieved according to one embodiment of the invention by printing and quilting a strip of fabric along a width of the same web material of which the top and bottom panels are being made. The border panel printing and quilting are carried out under the control of a programmed controller, preferably the same controller that coordinates the application of the printed designs and quilted patterns on the top and bottom panels. The border panels so made are then cut or slit from the web that carries the top and bottom panels.
As an alternative to forming border panels out of the same web as the top and bottom panels, a separate but smaller machine having separate quilting and printing stations may be provided adjacent and linked to the main machine on which the mattress top and bottom panels can be applied. The separate machine is supplied with material for forming the border panels that is narrower than, but matches, the material supplied to the main machine for forming the top and bottom panels. Both machines are controlled by the same controller or a controllers that are in communication with each other to coordinate the making of the mattress cover units or batches of units with matching or coordinated top, bottom and border panels. Border panels are of different widths, corresponding to mattresses of different thicknesses, and are of a length equal to the periphery of the mattress rather than the length of the mattress. In addition, border panels have thinner fill layers, being in the range of from xc2xc to xc2xd inches thick, where the top and bottom panels are usually from xc2xd inch to 3 or 4 inches thick. For these reasons, the embodiment using the separate border panel machine is preferred in that it provides for more efficient use of different lengths of material and provides less process complexity.
According to certain other principles of the present invention, webs of ticking or units of other fabric are printed with patterns under the control of a computer controlled printer. Such printers are typically digital printers and may be referred to as digital printers, and include ink jet printers, continuous and dot-on-demand printers, and other printers that print images by dispensing ink or other printing medium in response to pattern information, which can usually vary from copy to copy, rather than from a physical mat, plate or mechanical transfer surface such as those commonly used for printing multiple copies of the same image.
In the preferred application of such principles, an ink jet printer scans a web of ticking material transversely and prints on the web in response to signals from a programmed computer. In one preferred embodiment of the invention, each scan row need not necessarily print only on the same panel, but can print one or more lines of each of several panels that are arranged transversely across the web of material. Each panel can be printed with the same pattern, each with a different pattern or some with the same pattern and others with one or more different patterns. Top and bottom panels that match or correspond to each of the border panels can be printed on different parts of the same or a different web.
Patterns on different panels of the same product, such as on adjacent top and side panels of a mattress cover, can be printed so as to be coordinated such that the patterns or pattern parts align when the mattress cover is assembled. Integrated panels can also be produced, with the side and top panels, for example, of a mattress cover attached at their common seams, with the patterns on each panel varied in size, shape and orientation as is appropriate for the respective panel. In addition, material can be printed to produce visually coordinated products, such as sheets, pillow cases, drapes and other products, with the patterns on the different products printed to different scales as are appropriate for the respective products. Such different products can then be arranged and printed on the same material in the most material efficient arrangement, with the print head scanning different ones of the products across the web. On quilted products, the printed patterns can be automatically scaled to accommodate shrinkage due to quilting, which can be based on either measured or calculated information.
After printing, the webs of ticking are usually quilted to one or more layers of fill material and usually a layer of backing material. The quilting may be applied to quilt different patterns on different panels or different sections of web containing more than one panel, or an entire web or length of web may be quilted with a generic pattern.
According to one aspect of the invention, Jacquard material (in which ornate patterns are woven into an otherwise plane material, are simulated by printing patterns on the same plane material background. In one application, for example, greige goods of the same background as the Jacquard material, can be printed to match the Jacquard material, with the actual Jacquard material providing the top and bottom panels of a mattress cover and the simulated material providing the border panels. In this way, the less noticeable border panels need not be made up in each and every Jacquard material, but a single print line can be set up to make, on demand, matching border panels in small lots to correspond to each product order.
After the printing and after the quilting, where applicable, different panels are separated from adjacent panels of the web by longitudinal slitting or transverse cutting. The cut panels are subsequently matched with other corresponding panels to form a mattress cover, which is matched with a spring interior unit and one or more layers of padding for assembly into a bedding product.
Each panel is preferably identified with a particular bedding product and may be identified with a particular item of a particular customer order. The identification and/or information relating to the properties of the panel can be contained in a computer file that is synchronized to each panel on the fabric. Such information can also be printed or coded on the fabric, on or adjacent a panel, preferably in the same printing operation that applies the printed panels to the material, which coding can be in the form of either manually readable information, machine readable information or a combination of manually readable and machine readable information. Such information can be manually read for control of the quilting, the cutting and slitting and the machine of panels and assembly into bedding products. Preferably, the information is automatically read and signals are then generated in response to the information to control the quilting of the printed material, the cutting and slitting of the panels from the web, and the matching of corresponding panels for assembly into bedding products.
Product labels such as those identifying the manufacturer, a retailer or a bedding product type or model, as well as describing the product, can be printed on the fabric in the same operation as the printing of a panel with a pattern. Further, the government required tag, called a law-tag, can be printed onto the substrate and the content of the tag can be derived from information in the system controller as to the content of the product being produced.
The present invention provides great flexibility in producing products of a wide variety of appearances and greatly reduces the ticking inventories of a mattress manufacturer.
The present invention also provides the ability to change printed patterns in the course of a quilting run, and to change both printed and quilted patterns to produce quilted products in a wide variety of composite patterns. With the invention, the number of base cloth supplies required to provide pattern variety is greatly reduced, saving substantial costs to the quilted product manufacturer. With the invention, the appearance of the outer layer can be embellished to provide variety and detail, and outline quilting can be carried out in high quality and in close proximity to the printed design. Further, with the invention, these advantages are available with both single needle and multiple needle quilters.
These and other objects of the present invention will be more readily apparent from the following detailed description of the drawings.